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This page may be useful: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/44247/how-to-copy-directories-with-preserving-hardlinks http://unix.stackexchange.com/question

This page may be useful: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/44247/how-to-copy-directories-with-preserving-hardlinks http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/44247/how-to-copy-di... The main issue is that there's no api to get the list of files hard linked together: the only way is to check all the existing files and compare inodes. If you're doing a plain copy over 2 fs, you cannot choose which number the target inode will be, so you need to keep a map between inode numbers, or between inodes and file names ("cp" does the later).

sounds 12y ago
pedrocr's comment above suggests a good solution: 1. Copy each file from the source volume to a single directory (e.g. /tmp) on the target volume, named for the source volume inode number. (edit: I suggest using a hierarchy of dirs to avoid the "too many dentry's" slowdown) 2. If the file has already been copied, it will already exist in /tmp - looking up the inode is a vanilla directory lookup 3. Create a hard link from /tmp to the actual path of the file 4. When all the files have been created on the target volume, delete the inode numbers in /tmp